Emotion is an integral component in many aspects of life, and can play an important role in determining the type of information that is remembered and the strength of those memories. Despite the potential significance of emotional functioning for memory performance, relatively little research has focused on the interaction between emotion and memory in older adults. The present research program focuses on the processing of emotional information over the life span and the influence that emotion has on memory for both the content and context of information. Specifically, the proposed studies address two main issues. The first concern concerns the efficacy of emotional functioning with age, and other consequences of potential-age related impairments in emotional processing for memory performance. A series experiments examines younger and older adults' memory for items with strong emotional content (e.g., words such as "gloom" or images of babies) relative to that for neutral items (e.g., words such as "level" or images of furniture) in a variety of contexts to assess whether the effect of emotional content is similar across age groups. In addition, the present work investigates whether the ability to use emotional cues to aid retrieval for both the content and context of information varies with age. A second related issue concerns the mechanisms responsible for heightened memory of emotional relative to neutral information, and changes in these mechanisms with age. The proposed research examines the contributions of both controlled, elaborative processes and automatic, pre-attentive processes to memory for emotional information, and explores whether one or both of these types of processes are impaired in older adults. The proposed studies employ full and divided attention conditions and utilize both implicit and explicit memory measures to investigate the impact of automatic and controlled processes on memory for emotionally-valenced material. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a framework for understanding emotional functioning in older adults and the interaction between emotion and memory.